How to Make the Internet a Lot Faster

Last week, Google announced its plans to build an experimental fiber network that would offer gigabit-per-second broadband speeds to up to 500,000 U.S. homes. Among other goals, the company said it wanted to "test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere."
Google hasn't released many details yet, but experts believe that the key to successful very-high-speed broadband doesn't lie in fiber alone. To really speed up the Internet, Google will have to operate at many levels of its infrastructure.

Gigabit-per-second speeds are much faster than, for example, the speed currently offered by high-speed services such as Verizon FiOS. However, Google's network won't be the first to reach such speeds. There are several such deployments internationally, including in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Australia. Internet2, a nonprofit advanced networking consortium in the United States, has been experimenting with very-high-speed Internet for more than a decade, routinely offering 10-gigabit connections to university researchers.

Existing applications for very-high-speed Internet include the transfer of very large files, streaming high-definition (and possibly 3-D) video, video conferencing, and gaming. Some experts speculate that accessing large data files and applications through the cloud may also require better broadband.

"Just big pipes alone to an end user does not necessarily guarantee that you can deliver high-end applications," says Gary Bachula, vice president of external relations for Internet2. There are many factors beyond raw bandwidth, Bachula says. For example, an improperly configured router or a university firewall can affect performance and end up acting as a network bottleneck.

"You need to have open networks, you need to publish your performance data, you need to have people troubleshoot your network remotely," says Bachula. In recent years, Internet2 has been researching tools and technologies that can help find and resolve the performance issues that occur on high-speed connections "in a systematic and seamless way." Ideally, he says, consumers as well as network managers would be able to use these tools to diagnose the network.
"If we're really going to realize the vision of some of these high-end applications, it does have to go beyond basic raw bandwidth," he adds.

It's also not enough to build a fast hardware infrastructure, says Steven Low, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Caltech, and cofounder of the network optimization technology company FastSoft, based in Pasadena, CA. Low believes the protocols that move traffic through the network will also need to be updated to make effective use of very-high-speed capabilities.

A Giant Leap for Humanoid Kind [video included]

The next generation of explorers to walk on the moon or Mars could be called robonauts. They may perform similar scientific tasks to astronauts, but wouldn't require any of the life support equipment or shelter. The first robonaut could travel to the space station to work side by side with astronauts in the next three years, if plans at NASA come to fruition.
NASA and General Motors are developing the first of these humanoid robots, called Robonaut2. Unlike NASA's Mars rovers, Robonaut2 is designed to closely mimic the shape, movement, and behavior of a human. This could make it ideally suited to working alongside humans, or for testing human spacecraft and living quarters, but it also presents some unique engineering challenges. GM hopes to use the robots in its manufacturing plants and to incorporate the resulting technology into some of its products, including vehicle safety systems.

The engineers behind Robonaut2 began working on the robot in 2007; its design originated from a version that NASA created more than 10 years ago.

Robonaut2 currently consists of just an upper torso. It weighs about 45 kilograms and is equipped with over 350 sensors. These include tactile sensors on the contact points of the robot's fingers and its palms, and proximity sensors in its arms. Engineers have also built springs and elastic materials in the joints to give the robot better control and flexibility, and to allow it to move at faster, more humanlike speeds. The robot can carry payloads of about nine kilograms--four times more than other humanoid robots.

Rob Ambrose, chief of the Software, Robotics and Simulation Division at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, says the new robot is a significant improvement over its predecessor. "It's designed to operate at a speed and scale similar to humans, and when it encounters people it complies and safely works with them," he says.The technology needed to perceive humans and respond to human action is particularly important, and this is something that researchers all over the world are working on, says Matthew Mason, a professor of robotics and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Robonaut2 is an important platform for developing and testing such techniques, he adds.

Another key challenge is enabling Robonaut2 to communicate effectively with astronauts. "This is really a new area," adds Bilge Mutlu, an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a member of the human computer interaction lab at CMU. "How does a robot interpret social cues? How does it communicate back? We want robots to be team members, and the new work is a step in that direction." For the moment, Robonaut2 is limited to communicating with humans in simple ways. For example, when it points its head toward something, it is a cue that the human working alongside the robot should look in that direction.

Busting Blood Clots with Sound Waves

An ultrasound device designed to produce highly focused sound waves might one day be used to break up stroke-causing blood clots in the brain without surgery or drugs. So far, the system has only been tested on clots in test tubes and animals, but researchers aim to start human tests by the end of 2011.
Thilo Hoelscher, a neurologist at the University of California at San Diego, is attacking the clots with a device developed by Israeli ultrasound technology company InSightec. The device surrounds the head with an array of transducers that can focus ultrasound beams on a single spot in the brain without damaging the skull.

The technology is already being tested in patients to remove diseased brain tissue, but treating stroke will require a more delicate hand. Hoelscher and colleagues will need to prove that the device can break up a clot without damaging nearby brain tissue.

Strokes are the most common cause of long-term disability in the United States, and the third most common cause of death. Typically, they occur when a blood clot blocks an artery and prevents blood from flowing to the brain. The longer the clot remains, the more brain tissue dies, and the lower a person's chance for survival. "Anything you can do that's going to safely restore blood flow more quickly could have a lot of potential for societal, medical, and economic impact," says Evan Unger, a radiologist at the University of Arizona who is not involved in the research.
Today, only two proven methods are in use to bust clots. A drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) dissolves clots, but it can only be given to certain patients, and it usually must be administered within three hours of the stroke itself. Alternatively, some clots can be physically retrieved through a blood vessel, but few hospitals practice this technique. Overall, perhaps fewer than 10 percent of all patients are candidates for either of these interventions.

InSightec's high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) device is a bit like a helmet, lined with more than 1,000 ultrasound transducers. Each can be focused individually to send a beam into the brain of the person wearing the helmet. The focused beams converge on a spot only four millimeters wide, accurate enough to hit an artery-blocking clot and dissolve it in under a minute. "Outside this focus, the ultrasound energy is completely negligible," Hoelscher says.

A Tongue-Tracking Artificial Larynx

Researchers in South Africa are working on a new kind of artificial larynx that won't have the raspy voice of existing devices. The system tracks contact between the tongue and palate to determine which word is being mouthed, and uses a speech synthesizer to generate sounds.

According to the National Cancer Institute, some 10,000 Americans are diagnosed with laryngeal cancer each year, and most patients with advanced cancer must have their voice box removed.

"All of the currently available devices produce such bad sound--it either sounds robotic or has a gruff speaking voice," says Megan Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. "We felt the tech was there for an artificial synthesized voice solution."

The system uses a palatometer: a device that looks much like an orthodontic plate and is normally used for speech therapy. The device, made by CompleteSpeech of Orem, UT, tracks contact between the tongue and palate using 118 embedded touch sensors. The software for the artificial larynx was written by Russell and colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand. Their work is being presented at the International Conference on Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Engineering this week in Singapore.

To use the device, a person puts the palatometer in her mouth and mouths words normally. The system tries to translate those mouth movements into words before reproducing them on a small sound synthesizer, perhaps tucked into a shirt pocket.

So far, Russell has trained the system to recognize 50 common English words by saying each word multiple times with the palatometer in her mouth. The information can be represented on a binary space-time graph and put into a database. Each time the user speaks, the contact patterns are compared against the database to identify the correct word.

Russell's team has tested the word-identification system using a variety of techniques. One approach involves aligning and averaging the data produced while training the device for a few instances of a word to create a template for comparison. Another compares features such as the area of the data plots on the graph, and the center of mass on the X and Y axes. A voting system compares the results of selected methods to see whether there is agreement. The researchers have also tested a predictive-analysis system, which considers the last word mouthed to help determine the next.

Russell says that when the voting and predictive elements are combined, the system identifies the correct word 94.14 percent of the time, although this doesn't include words that the system classifies as "unknown" and chooses to skip. Russell says that happens about 18 percent of the time. But choosing the wrong word "could lead to some very difficult social situations," Russell says, so it's best for the system to reject unclear words and remain silent.

Searching Facebook More Intimately

In the search industry's push to mine online social networks for improved results, the search engine Cuil has become the first to index information from your Facebook friends. Cuil then places direct and thematically related results from your Facebook network beside general Web search results.

The search offering, called Facebook Results, only works if you opt in from a Cuil search-return page. Once you do that, Cuil indexes your Facebook network in a few seconds. Afterward, any Cuil general Web search you perform also turns up items from your Facebook network and posts them in a right-hand column.

Cuil's search algorithms find direct and related results. For example, my search for "asthma" summoned Facebook posts from a friend who had started a health-care networking website, others from a high-school classmate writing about his cancer diagnosis (the word "diagnosis" was deemed relevant), as well as a few posts about people's colds and sinus complaints. A search for "Ecuador" turned up a travel agent acquaintance who was talking about a jungle tour, as well as a post from a journalist friend who was passing along a news story about the Congo (the technology picked up on the developing-nation theme).

In contrast, when I performed my "asthma" and "Ecuador" searches within Facebook, the Facebook engine gave me only general hits such as Facebook pages for asthma sufferers or national fan sites for Ecuador, but nothing at all from any of my friends' posts.

The Cuil technology is built on Facebook Connect, the existing Facebook interface that other websites use to gain exposure within the social network. Facebook permitted Cuil to indexes users' content--when permitted by individual users--on the condition that the information could only be viewed by the searcher, and that Cuil would not let other search engines access the Facebook information, according to Seval Oz Ozveren, a Cuil vice president. Facebook Results is the first such release between Cuil and a social networking site to integrate users' social profile on search pages. It was announced in November; the concept was first discussed by Cuil in July. More such deals are expected to follow, she says.

"Social search is here to stay, and we are certain to see more Facebook integration by other players as well," says Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist and search researcher at the University of Washington, who added that Facebook's permissions will be the key to such efforts. "We see how important Facebook and other social networks are, and we also see how Facebook is seeking to parlay that importance into a role on other sites using initiatives like Facebook Connect, and now this one."

Who's Typing Your Password?

Passwords can be one of the weakest links in online security. Users too often choose one that's easily guessed or poorly protected; even strong passwords may need to be combined with additional measures, such as a smart card or a fingerprint scan, for extra protection.

Delfigo Security, a startup based in Boston, has a simpler solution to bolstering password security. By looking at how a user types each character and by collecting other subtle clues as to her identity, the company's software creates an additional layer of security without the need for extra equipment or user actions.

The software, called DSGateway, can be combined with an existing authentication process. As a user enters her name and password, JavaScript records her typing pattern along with other information, such as her system configuration and geographic location. When the user clicks "submit," her data is sent to the Web server and, provided that the username and password are correct, the additional information is passed on to Delfigo. The company's system then evaluates how well this information matches the behavior patterns of the appropriate authorized user.

Delfigo's algorithms build up a profile of each user during a short training period, combing 14 different factors. The company's president and CEO, Ralph Rodriguez, developed the necessary algorithms while working as a research fellow at MIT. Rodriguez notes that recording multiple factors is crucial to keeping the system secure without making it unusable. If the user types a password with one hand, for example, while holding coffee in the other, the system must turn to other factors to decide how to interpret the variation, he says. If she does this every morning, the system will learn to expect to see this behavior at that time of day.

The idea that a password should completely succeed or completely fail "is an old paradigm that should go away," says Rodriguez. Even if the system sees something strange about the way that a user enters her password, for example, it just assigns a confidence level to that log-in attempt. Access levels can be configured depending on this confidence level. For example, if a user logs in from an odd location, lowering the system's confidence, it might allow her to see her account balance but restrict the funds that she is able to transfer. If the user needs to increase her confidence factor at that moment, Rodriguez says, she could answer additional security questions or have a one-time password sent to her mobile phone or via e-mail.

Making 3D Maps on the Move

At a robotics conference last week, a vehicle called ROAMS demonstrated a cheap approach to mobile map-making.

ROAMS (Remotely Operated and Autonomous Mapping System) was created by researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, with funding from the U.S. Army. It uses several existing mapping technologies to build 3D color maps of its surroundings, and it was demonstrated at the 2009 IEEE conference on Technologies for Practical Robot Applications in Woburn, MA last week.

The system uses LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), which involves bouncing a laser off a rapidly rotating mirror and measuring how the light bounces back from surrounding surfaces and objects. The same technology is already used to guide autonomous vehicles, to make aerial maps, and in spacecraft landing systems.

A conventional 3D LIDAR system, which consists of several lasers pointing in different directions, costs over $100,000. The Stevens researchers created a cheaper mapping system by mounting a commercial 2D LIDAR sensor, which costs about $6,000, on a pivoting, rotating framework atop the vehicle. While the system has a lower resolution than a regular 3D LIDAR, it could still be used for low-cost architectural surveying and map making in military situations, the researchers say. "The prototype system is around $15,000 to $20,000," says Bilge Gebre, a research engineer at Stevens who demonstrated the device.

The system takes about 30 seconds to scan a 160-meter-wide area. A color camera also on the rotating frame provides color information that is added to the map later on. And the Stevens researchers developed a way to maintain the same resolution by automatically adjusting the scanning process depending on the proximity of objects. A human operator rides in a larger vehicle that follows the robotic one from up to a mile away, says Kishore Pochiraju, professor and the director of the Design and Manufacturing Institute at Stevens. Ultimately, says Pochiraju, "we want to leave this robot in a location and ask it to generate a complete map." Such a vehicle could, for example, drive into a dangerous area and generate a detailed map for military personnel.

"They're using a relatively low-cost system," says John Spletzer, an associate professor at Lehigh University who uses similar technology to create autonomous wheelchairs. "There's a lot of groups working on it; it's pretty interesting."

Nicholas Roy, an associate professor at MIT who develops autonomous and self-navigating vehicles, also notes that other research groups have developed similar technology. He says that the biggest challenges in autonomous map-making are identifying obstacles and sharing mapping between several robots.